Friday, August 23, 2013
Tuesday, August 20, 2013
Letter to the Editor: GA Rep Westmoreland: Minimum Wage
I hope during Representative Westmoreland’s Townhall on Monday that many people will remind him that it is time for a raise by encouraging him to support raising the minimum wage to $10.50/hr from the current $7.25.
He should support “The Catching Up to 1968 Act of 2013.”
That’s right: In 1968, the real value of minimum wage was $10.65. Ever since then, we’ve been losing ground.
It’s time for a raise, Rep. Westmoreland: support “The Catching Up to 1968 Act of 2013.”
Currently, those who work minimum wage fall well below the federal poverty level of $18,123. It bothers me that people can’t break even.
It’s time for a raise, Rep. Westmoreland: support “The Catching Up to 1968 Act of 2013.”
According to many leading economists in an open letter in support of the bill, “If a worker today is employed full time for a full 52-week year at a minimum wage job today, she or he is making $15,080. This is 19 percent below the official poverty line for a family of three.”
It’s time for a raise, Rep. Westmoreland: support
“The Catching Up to 1968 Act of 2013.”
Like me, many people have always assumed that only young people make minimum wage; however, the economists write that “only 9.3 percent of the workers who would benefit from this minimum wage increase are teenagers; i.e., 90.7 percent are adults.”
It’s time for a raise, Rep. Westmoreland: support “The Catching Up to 1968 Act of 2013.”
According to the Thomaston Chamber of Commerce, that as of 20007 Wal-Mart is the area’s second largest employer. I didn’t know until recently that Wal-Mart’s CEO makes $11,000 an hour? The average Wal-Mart employee, however, makes $15,576 a year.
My Gosh!:
Wal-Mart’s CEO makes $11,000 an hour.
The average Wal-Mart employee makes $15,576 a year.
It’s time for a raise, Mr. Westmoreland: support
“The Catching Up to 1968 Act of 2013.”
Now, Rep. Westmoreland will argue that raising the minimum to a living wage will kill jobs. In fact, he’ll reference the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA), which says that the minimum kills jobs. However, this “think tank’s” own Website admits that it’s in the tank for big business. The NCPA has always resisted the bill.
Therefore, he responded to a letter I wrote him by telling me he doesn’t support this modest raise in the minimum wage now or anytime soon.
It’s time for a raise, Mr. Westmoreland: support “The Catching Up to 1968 Act of 2013.”
In fact, the economists who write in support of the bill argue that “the weight of evidence from the extensive professional literature has, for decades, consistently found that no significant effects on employment opportunities result when the minimum wage rises in reasonable increments. This is because the increases in overall business costs resulting from a minimum wage increase are modest.”
These economists, furthermore, argue that “on average, even fast-food restaurants, which employ a disproportionate share of minimum wage workers, are likely to see their overall business costs increase by only about 2.7 percent from a rise today to a $10.50 federal minimum wage. That means, for example, that McDonalds could cover fully half of the cost increase by raising the price of a Big Mac, on average, from $4.00 to $4.05. The remaining half of the adjustment could come through small productivity gains or a slightly more equal distribution of companies’ total revenues.”
It’s time for a raise, Mr. Westmoreland: support “The Catching Up to 1968 Act of 2013.”
It’s time for Wal-Mart—Upson County’s second largest employer—to pay its employees a living wage, one that doesn’t force its hard working employees on Medicaid and Food Stamps.
Henry Ford once said the following: “If you cut wages, you just cut the number of your own customers. If an employer does not share prosperity with those who make him prosperous, then pretty soon there will be no prosperity to share. That is why we think it is good business always to raise wages and never to lower them. We like to have plenty of customers.”
If you’d like more information on this subject, please visit timeforaraise.org
I hope all of you will go to the Townhall on Monday and tell Representative Westmoreland that It’s time for a raise: support “The Catching Up to 1968 Act of 2013.”
Sincerely,
He should support “The Catching Up to 1968 Act of 2013.”
That’s right: In 1968, the real value of minimum wage was $10.65. Ever since then, we’ve been losing ground.
It’s time for a raise, Rep. Westmoreland: support “The Catching Up to 1968 Act of 2013.”
Currently, those who work minimum wage fall well below the federal poverty level of $18,123. It bothers me that people can’t break even.
It’s time for a raise, Rep. Westmoreland: support “The Catching Up to 1968 Act of 2013.”
According to many leading economists in an open letter in support of the bill, “If a worker today is employed full time for a full 52-week year at a minimum wage job today, she or he is making $15,080. This is 19 percent below the official poverty line for a family of three.”
It’s time for a raise, Rep. Westmoreland: support
“The Catching Up to 1968 Act of 2013.”
Like me, many people have always assumed that only young people make minimum wage; however, the economists write that “only 9.3 percent of the workers who would benefit from this minimum wage increase are teenagers; i.e., 90.7 percent are adults.”
It’s time for a raise, Rep. Westmoreland: support “The Catching Up to 1968 Act of 2013.”
According to the Thomaston Chamber of Commerce, that as of 20007 Wal-Mart is the area’s second largest employer. I didn’t know until recently that Wal-Mart’s CEO makes $11,000 an hour? The average Wal-Mart employee, however, makes $15,576 a year.
My Gosh!:
Wal-Mart’s CEO makes $11,000 an hour.
The average Wal-Mart employee makes $15,576 a year.
It’s time for a raise, Mr. Westmoreland: support
“The Catching Up to 1968 Act of 2013.”
Now, Rep. Westmoreland will argue that raising the minimum to a living wage will kill jobs. In fact, he’ll reference the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA), which says that the minimum kills jobs. However, this “think tank’s” own Website admits that it’s in the tank for big business. The NCPA has always resisted the bill.
Therefore, he responded to a letter I wrote him by telling me he doesn’t support this modest raise in the minimum wage now or anytime soon.
It’s time for a raise, Mr. Westmoreland: support “The Catching Up to 1968 Act of 2013.”
In fact, the economists who write in support of the bill argue that “the weight of evidence from the extensive professional literature has, for decades, consistently found that no significant effects on employment opportunities result when the minimum wage rises in reasonable increments. This is because the increases in overall business costs resulting from a minimum wage increase are modest.”
These economists, furthermore, argue that “on average, even fast-food restaurants, which employ a disproportionate share of minimum wage workers, are likely to see their overall business costs increase by only about 2.7 percent from a rise today to a $10.50 federal minimum wage. That means, for example, that McDonalds could cover fully half of the cost increase by raising the price of a Big Mac, on average, from $4.00 to $4.05. The remaining half of the adjustment could come through small productivity gains or a slightly more equal distribution of companies’ total revenues.”
It’s time for a raise, Mr. Westmoreland: support “The Catching Up to 1968 Act of 2013.”
It’s time for Wal-Mart—Upson County’s second largest employer—to pay its employees a living wage, one that doesn’t force its hard working employees on Medicaid and Food Stamps.
Henry Ford once said the following: “If you cut wages, you just cut the number of your own customers. If an employer does not share prosperity with those who make him prosperous, then pretty soon there will be no prosperity to share. That is why we think it is good business always to raise wages and never to lower them. We like to have plenty of customers.”
If you’d like more information on this subject, please visit timeforaraise.org
I hope all of you will go to the Townhall on Monday and tell Representative Westmoreland that It’s time for a raise: support “The Catching Up to 1968 Act of 2013.”
Sincerely,
Monday, July 30, 2012
Notes from Annette Insdorf introduction to the screening of Kaufman's _The Unbearable Lightness of Being) at the National Gallery for the Arts.
Unlike most artists whom we can instantly recognize, Insdorf argues that Kaufman is simply "too damn versatile" for us to know a film is his unless we know going in that a film is actually his. Think _The Right Stuff_ and _The Unbearable Lightness of Being_ being from the same film maker. In other words, he doesn't have a signature trope or technique. We know a Woody Allen film when we see one. We don't know a Kaufman is a Kaufman until we know. Take a look at the various films he's made and you'll see what she means.
She argues that he's constantly changing because he's always tryingt to find the appropiate cinematic medium or technique for the story he's telling.
Many thought that no one could properly translate Kundera's novel to a film because no one thought you could properly translate his ideas and thoughts and philosophy that he uses words to convey and put that into a character driven film. Kaufman, however, succeeds in taking the verbal to visual. Kaufman made this a story about "voyeurism," about "watching," about "surveillance."
Think mirrors; think the delayed reveals, people and objects in the process of becoming . . .
He makes us appreciate sensuality.
------
"Our lives are composed of music."
Music by Janicek. Kundera's father studied with him. Kundera suggested his music for the score, rather than an original score.
Kaufman: form should be musical
Bright (Adarte) to Slow (Addagio) [she confused the two herself).
The move follows that form.
Form: Theme and variations
repetition of motifs riffing from Nietzche's "eternal return," which she suggests we can't ever really literally understand but Kaufman gets us close. Note all the moments in this film where objects return.
Mirrors create internal rhymes.
Theme of Photograph--another form of eternal return.
Perception and limitation
Personal freedom and its costs.
Freedom from the tyranny of technology.
Movie makes us feel we are reading because we must actively participate to make the film work.
"Priviledges and limitations" of story telling.
Kundera=abstraction; Kaufman=obstruction.
voyeurism --- seeing (sanctioned/forbidden)
Wants us to think about how much we are allowed to see . . . . totalitarianism
How much do we allow ourselves to see?
Kaufman brings overt attention to sight with the Oedipus Rex return . . .
A good film coheres and resonates.
IF a work doesn't resonate, then it fails.
Unlike most artists whom we can instantly recognize, Insdorf argues that Kaufman is simply "too damn versatile" for us to know a film is his unless we know going in that a film is actually his. Think _The Right Stuff_ and _The Unbearable Lightness of Being_ being from the same film maker. In other words, he doesn't have a signature trope or technique. We know a Woody Allen film when we see one. We don't know a Kaufman is a Kaufman until we know. Take a look at the various films he's made and you'll see what she means.
She argues that he's constantly changing because he's always tryingt to find the appropiate cinematic medium or technique for the story he's telling.
Many thought that no one could properly translate Kundera's novel to a film because no one thought you could properly translate his ideas and thoughts and philosophy that he uses words to convey and put that into a character driven film. Kaufman, however, succeeds in taking the verbal to visual. Kaufman made this a story about "voyeurism," about "watching," about "surveillance."
Think mirrors; think the delayed reveals, people and objects in the process of becoming . . .
He makes us appreciate sensuality.
------
"Our lives are composed of music."
Music by Janicek. Kundera's father studied with him. Kundera suggested his music for the score, rather than an original score.
Kaufman: form should be musical
Bright (Adarte) to Slow (Addagio) [she confused the two herself).
The move follows that form.
Form: Theme and variations
repetition of motifs riffing from Nietzche's "eternal return," which she suggests we can't ever really literally understand but Kaufman gets us close. Note all the moments in this film where objects return.
Mirrors create internal rhymes.
Theme of Photograph--another form of eternal return.
Perception and limitation
Personal freedom and its costs.
Freedom from the tyranny of technology.
Movie makes us feel we are reading because we must actively participate to make the film work.
"Priviledges and limitations" of story telling.
Kundera=abstraction; Kaufman=obstruction.
voyeurism --- seeing (sanctioned/forbidden)
Wants us to think about how much we are allowed to see . . . . totalitarianism
How much do we allow ourselves to see?
Kaufman brings overt attention to sight with the Oedipus Rex return . . .
A good film coheres and resonates.
IF a work doesn't resonate, then it fails.
Monday, May 7, 2012
Making a Separate Peace: The Ethics of Eating Meat
Our Submission for the NYTIMES Contest
Our Submission for the NYTIMES Contest
Nothing we eat has an interest in being eaten. We eat ethically, therefore, only when we eat consciously, by knowing the origins of our food and by recognizing the sacrifice of the life we have taken. We eat according to our own value system, which has been constructed through our own experience – a sense of place, a feeling of home, our memories.
While the vegan movement certainly has staked the ethical high ground, making an all-encompassing argument that eating meat harms animals, the human body, and the environment, the movement often does so while challenging the ethical value of eating meat. The movement has in some instances taken the easy way out – equating animals and humans while never acknowledging that plants are species that deserve the same respect.
PETA, furthermore, claims that eating vegan is “one of the single most effective things that you can do” to protect the environment. Most who care about the issue, however, are well versed with the often abhorrent conditions--for livestock, humans, and the environment--in which much of the meat we eat is produced. While we can all agree that it’s not ethical to eat meat that has been produced in such unsustainable and inhumane conditions, we can also argue that it’s not ethical to eat plants that have been produced in similarly poor conditions.
If we find the form of production abhorrent, therefore, we should not purchase that product no matter the content: vegetable or meat, cotton or Nike shoes. It is not for us to judge the product’s intrinsic value, but it is our duty to judge the mode in which that product was produced. Or as Thoreau reminds us, we should not pursue our own concerns “while sitting upon another man's shoulders. [We] must get off him first, that he may pursue his contemplations too.”
However, if we harvest that content in maximally sustainable ways and in humane conditions and we still denigrate meat consumption, then we expose the underlying ideology involved. We are clearly saying, then, that we value life that has brains over life that doesn’t. In short, we privilege the frog over the ramp, a cow over a carrot. After all, when we harvest a carrot, we are killing it, even if it does not scream or blood doesn’t flow from its veins.
In both cases, we’ve made dead what had a clear interest in staying alive. If under equal conditions, we still argue that eating the carrot makes me more ethical than eating the cow, then I’m valuing the cow’s life over the carrot’s. And that’s simply a subjective judgment of what each of us thinks has intrinsic value.
And if all life-- animal or plant--has intrinsic value, then by eating anything, we are sacrificing another life form to sustain our own. In other words, we must make a separate peace with the life we ultimately consume, no matter the form that life takes. Ultimately, we should not privilege any animate life over another.
Competing value systems will always exist. Those who value biodiversity, for example, have a particular interest in consuming meat, such as invasive or overpopulated species. This value system collides with the vegan value system, which often priviledges animal life over plant life. These competing and equally valid ideals address different issues which have ethical value -- depending on the perspective.
So in defense of eating meat – or eating anything for that matter -- as long as these value systems have been seriously considered and we consume consciously, ethically – then eat away.
Saturday, February 11, 2012
Andrew
https://www.youtube.com/v/ILZQSmE5Uu0?version=3&feature=player_detailpage%22%20type=%22application/x-shockwave-flash
This is what an asshat looks like.
Monday, July 25, 2011
Another Lesson from the Beyond
I never really new Wil Mills. Being that I was a Freshman to his Senior while we were at McCallie together in 1988, I know we never had a conversation. Maybe he smiled at me once, or gave me a "Hey, kid." Maybe not.
I heard through a classmate of his, and a Facebook friend of mine, that Wil died today. Digging around a bit, I discovered that Wil had been a poet. In fact, he'd published two chapbooks, Light for Orphans and Right as Rain.
I also found this, his penultimate journal entry, once he realized he had aggressive terminal cancer. While I only quote a bit of it here, here's a link to its entirety: It's worth reading.
In what follows, Wil explains the difference between the Greek terms "Chronos," or clock time, and "Kairos," a "more open-ended and expansive" sense of time. I find it absolutely beautiful, and I'm forever grateful to this poet for temporarily pulling this idea from the Kairos and into the Chronos so the rest of us can perhaps get to Kairos ourselves, if for a moment.
Here's Wil:
"Too often we live only for the clock and fail to notice how, in the absence of incremental time, we would be more able to see the pattern in the rug, how the stained glass windows of our lives make sense as wholes and not as mere pieces.
But no one needs to get a terminal cancer to enter this place. The simplest way to enter the fullness of time is by breathing our words aloud to each other, and often, with love and hope. The miracle of spoken language is that it insists on face-to-face contact, or, in the case of a letter, it brings the speaker’s spirit into the room in a real sense and in real time at the right velocity, the speed of breathing. It has the tempo of people eating a meal together. In this sense, Kairos Time and spoken language are two sides of the same Koinonia [. . .] Don’t be surprised if you feel a new closeness with the person who is reading, or if you find yourself stepping into Kairos, where time is full and always ripe, where every invocation is also the perfect benediction."
I heard through a classmate of his, and a Facebook friend of mine, that Wil died today. Digging around a bit, I discovered that Wil had been a poet. In fact, he'd published two chapbooks, Light for Orphans and Right as Rain.
I also found this, his penultimate journal entry, once he realized he had aggressive terminal cancer. While I only quote a bit of it here, here's a link to its entirety: It's worth reading.
In what follows, Wil explains the difference between the Greek terms "Chronos," or clock time, and "Kairos," a "more open-ended and expansive" sense of time. I find it absolutely beautiful, and I'm forever grateful to this poet for temporarily pulling this idea from the Kairos and into the Chronos so the rest of us can perhaps get to Kairos ourselves, if for a moment.
Here's Wil:
"Too often we live only for the clock and fail to notice how, in the absence of incremental time, we would be more able to see the pattern in the rug, how the stained glass windows of our lives make sense as wholes and not as mere pieces.
But no one needs to get a terminal cancer to enter this place. The simplest way to enter the fullness of time is by breathing our words aloud to each other, and often, with love and hope. The miracle of spoken language is that it insists on face-to-face contact, or, in the case of a letter, it brings the speaker’s spirit into the room in a real sense and in real time at the right velocity, the speed of breathing. It has the tempo of people eating a meal together. In this sense, Kairos Time and spoken language are two sides of the same Koinonia [. . .] Don’t be surprised if you feel a new closeness with the person who is reading, or if you find yourself stepping into Kairos, where time is full and always ripe, where every invocation is also the perfect benediction."
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Health Insurance, the NFL, and You
In reading cnnsi's, "Star QBs Say Time is Now for Deal," I came across the following line about the leverage the NFL gains in the lockout from not paying health insurance:
On March 12, the owners imposed a lockout on the players, a right management has to shut down a business when a CBA expires. During the lockout, there can be no communication between the teams and current NFL players; no players - including those drafted in April - can be signed; teams won't pay for players' health insurance (bold mine).
In other words, the owners are using the players health as leverage to get them to return to work under the most favorable conditions for the owners. If, however, we had a national healthpayer scheme divorced from employers, then we, as individuals and as workers, would have much more power.
Perhaps we should all remember that as the debate continues.
On March 12, the owners imposed a lockout on the players, a right management has to shut down a business when a CBA expires. During the lockout, there can be no communication between the teams and current NFL players; no players - including those drafted in April - can be signed; teams won't pay for players' health insurance (bold mine).
In other words, the owners are using the players health as leverage to get them to return to work under the most favorable conditions for the owners. If, however, we had a national healthpayer scheme divorced from employers, then we, as individuals and as workers, would have much more power.
Perhaps we should all remember that as the debate continues.
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